The San Francisco Chronicle is has been running a great series on the history of Silicon Valley, which has its roots in radio engineers who formed hobby clubs not long after the big ‘06 earthquake.
“High-tech culture of Silicon Valley originally formed around radio”
“Tracing Silicon Valley’s roots”
Along with the birth of Hewlett-Packard in their famous Palo Alto garage, another key point on the “Silicon Valley timeline” was in 1957 when 8 engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Two of these engineers were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (author of “Moore’s Law”), who would later go on to start Intel.
The term “Silicon Valley” was created by entrepreneur Ralph Vaerst and used by his friend Don Hoefler in a series of “Silicon Valley USA” articles for Electronic News, starting with the January 11, 1971 issue. In 1975 the Homebrew Computer Club formed, where Steve Wozniak showed off the Apple I in 1976, and the rest is history.
Here Are A Few Related Posts You Might Enjoy:
- Silicon Valley WordPress Meetup at Google
- Hewlett-Packard (HP) Garage, Birthplace of Silicon Valley
- SiliCon 2007: Science Fiction, Horror, Comics & Anime
- History Hacker, Hosted by Bre Pettis on The History Channel
- Chap-Hop History, The History of Hip-Hop in Five Minutes by Mr.B The Gentleman Rhymer
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“great” series ??? … in the Sf chronicle???!! …from businees section writers??!
Not sure Tom Abate could write himself out of wet paper bag even if his Silicon Valley and various business world handlers gave him a GPS-equipped chainsaw…
Can anyone recommend any serious examination of the history of Silicon Vultures??
just looking at this image of all black-tied white males in a swamp of Cold War-groomed agendas and financing… surely there’s a juicy underbelly to understand the corporate and military pathways of digital culture and its social surrogate and hyper-consumer architecture.
Has anyone here seen Spectres of the Spectrum from Craig Baldwin? Genius inventors like Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television was left penniless because of the transistor-era media cartels… those roots of SV that Leslie Berlin describes as:
“Fairchild Semiconductor’s eight founders imbued the company with a corporate culture that today might be called “quintessential Silicon Valley”: open communications, laissez-faire management styles, flat organizational structures and autonomous research groups.
Hahaha!
SV operates like the SF gold rush on corporate crack ( i.e. defense contracts), and the only SV CEO who came out of his Aspen bunker for 2 minutes to see what impact the tech sector was having on life on the planet was Bill Joy, and then he went back into his hole, apparently to check on his stock options.
quote “just looking at this image of all black-tied white males in a swamp of Cold War-groomed agendas and financing”… sorry m.peggy My Uncle Ralph Vaerst is Indonesian